the most consistently productive and Opposite page, from provocative names in British art. top: ‘Eve’s Apple’ His studio is on the edge of East (2006), painted London, in the no-man’s land overlooking bronze; ‘Turk Love the Olympic Park in a black ex-garage Pink’ (2009). Below: with a red communist neon star above the the artist and ‘GT door. Surrounded by dusty warehouses Car Sticker’ (2008). and quick-build high-rise flats, it could not be in a more desolate location. The building was formerly a place where people printed fake money and fixed knock-off cars. It’s a strangely fitting home for Turk – echoing the ideas of recycling, reinvention and fakery that are at the heart of his work. In person, Turk is less confrontational and less chameleon-like than his work might suggest. Today he is wearing jeans and a white T-shirt featuring a black outline of an egg (a recurring motif in his work); he has a greying beard, a spark in his eye and a quick, sarcastic British sense of humour. Despite his success, Turk still has a hands-on relationship with art – even today, he’s creating a work on paper while being interviewed, surrounded by the mess of his studio. In the past few years he has created a number of public sculptures – notably Nail (2011), a comic giant nail that sits outside the Jean Nouvel-designed One New Change shopping centre near St Paul’s in London. This year he unveiled a bronze door entitled Ajar in the public gardens of a new housing development in Highbury, north London. ‘That was a real cast of the real door of the philanthropic project that became Action for Children. It was the door of the orphan home that was on that site before it was developed. A memory of the history of the space.’ Turk continues: ‘The difficult thing about working in public space – it’s open all the time. Quite often it doesn’t get looked at, because people think they can always see it another time. That it’s involuntarily there, in their face. There’s a strange point where making public sculptures is getting involved in an invisible activity. There’s something turned on its head about it.’ There is a generosity to Turk’s approach to art that separates him from many other YBAs. He is media savvy but comes across as open and natural. He is serious about art but he displays an impishness Gavin Turk is one of the anging above rather than the arrogance of some of his Hthe toilet in Gavin Turk’s contemporaries. Turk is interested in original Young British Artists. studio is a small Lucio a more collaborative vein of art. ‘It’s A CUP OF Fontana slashed canvas. In interesting the way someone like Jeremy Now he’s creating public the hallway, there’s a little Deller has become an important figure in sculptures and turning to Van Gogh portrait and an the art world. People like Simon Starling; Andy Warhol. Yet none of artists who are coming out of the gallery social projects. Outspoken these pieces are what they and working in a much more interactive seem. They are all works by way. It’s not the same sort of formal WITH GAVIN TURK as ever, he grants Baku an Turk that play on the ideas relationship between object and audience. of fame, perception and art I find it a rich seam for thinking.’ exclusive interview. history. Turk came to public Turk shows a resistance to the attention in the early 1990s mechanisms of the art world – even while Words by FRANCESCA GAVIN as one of the central Young he thrives within it: ‘I think it’s held to Portrait by BEN HOPPER British Artists or YBAs – the ransom by its industry – by its galleries, young guns changing the art collectors and auction houses. There’s world, one punk prank and quite a stranglehold on the output. I’m confrontational artwork at interested in it – but it can irk me.’ a time. During his 20-year His work is defined by its smart balance career, Turk has been one of of humour, pop accessibility and art xx Baku. being left out of the show’s opening private view, Turk smuggled himself into the RA dressed as a bum. ‘I had soiled, filthy clothes on. I stank of urine. I had a tin full of cigarettes that I’d picked up off the streets and re-rolled into rollies. It was a grim scene. I didn’t think what I was doing was art. Everyone was dressing up so [I thought] I’d just dress up as well.’ The well-heeled viewers at the glamorous opening didn’t know where to look. A year later he developed the idea of this liminal character who stood outside socialized society. ‘I started thinking this character – or this element within human nature or within a social structure – this character somehow created the frame, he started to delineate what was acceptable.’ Turk made a series of sculptures of himself as tramp figures. He followed this with a painted bronze sculpture of a curled-up figure in a dirty sleeping bag called Nomad (2003), and an empty sleeping bag piece entitled Habitat (2004). His aim was to touch on the audience’s desire not to look at a sleeping bag in the street, plus the Hello! magazine-style fascination to peak into people’s private spaces. Provocation is at the heart of Turk’s work. ‘I think that it’s probably harder to be provocative now because people’s barriers are a bit more expanded. This was before computers entered into everyone’s house, and there were still The guises of Gavin history. Originally as a direct Rubbish is a central motif in Turk, clockwise from reference to Jasper Johns’ Turk’s art – in paintings, ‘There’s this constANT above: ‘Large Red painted bronze beer cans prints, sculptures. The bronze ATTEMPT TO TRY AND MAKE Fright Wig’ (2011); from 1960, Turk began to cast pieces are a modern twist ‘Another Bum’ objects and paint them to on the ready-made – the ARTISTS LIKE POP STARS (1999); ‘Rock resemble reality. ‘I like the Duchampian idea that an Gunslinger Yellow idea that a bronze cast was, as everyday object could be an OR CELEBRITIES, BUT THEY and Green’ (2012); much as anything, evidence of artwork. The familiarity of his ‘Black on Tan Che’ something having at one point objects is unnerving. Unless don’t fit the mould.’ (2005); ‘Punk existed.’ A cast liquorice pipe, you touched his bin bags, it was not desirable. What do we keep and what Gunslinger Yellow with a nod to the Surrealist impossible to tell if they were do we throw away? How do we edit? I and Orange’ (2012). artist René Magritte’s famous real. ‘Suddenly you have to kept finding myself drawn to things that Opposite top: ‘Cave painting, was followed by one question everything,’ he says. people were throwing away, that the (edition)’ (1995). of his most successful works ‘Suddenly it makes everything moment that something was thrown away – a filled black bin bag. ‘I had around you possibly not what was the moment that the value had left it.’ to question myself as to why you thought it was.’ Turk’s desire to goad assumptions the bronze sculpture was Turk’s trompe l’oeil works emerged early, when Charles Saatchi preferential to just putting a have a sense of the abject opened the seminal ‘Sensation’ exhibition bag there. It seemed that by – things you want hidden and in 1997 at the Royal Academy – the show casting it in bronze, you thrown away, not necessarily that transformed the general public’s somehow arrested time. The shoved back into your life. As interest in modern art overnight. Saatchi creases, folds, reflections, Turk notes, ‘[It comes] back to exhibited some of Turk’s best-known shadows – all became fixed. this idea of what’s real or not works in the show, and as a tongue-in- They became precious.’ real, or what’s desirable or cheek response to how the artists were xx Baku. xx Baku. In the early 1990s, Turk continued with Turk isn’t angry at being pigeonholed to his split with Jopling’s White Cube. As attention-grabbing works. He made with his provocative contemporaries. ‘I Turk explains: ‘I didn’t really want to be waxworks of himself in the style of think that the idea of the YBA movement commercial and I was too slow to get on art-historical representations of famous was a strong and important one for giving and make product. I think the gallery was characters: Che Guevara, Marat, Elvis. artists [something] larger than a personal not flexible enough to represent me in all The most memorable was 1993’s Pop identity. I probably went in and out of it. the different ways that I was investigating (later featured in Saatchi’s ‘Sensation’ I think what it did was allow you to talk the object. I was looking at art making as show), a waxwork sculpture of Turk about a certain kind of young, socially a performance or working with children.’ dressed as Sid Vicious, performing Frank conscious art that was being produced at Turk had two children by the age of 28 Sinatra’s ‘My Way’, in the cowboy pose of the beginning of the 1990s in the UK. It with his partner Deborah Curtis – the Andy Warhol’s Elvis. The waxworks said was a rough sort of carryall.’ first only two years out of his MA.